Dreamweaver/Fireworks: All Together Now

Oh what a tangled Web we weave. Your Web site may look impeccable on the outside, but a peek backstage can reveal stray files, wayward folders, and unnecessary code. Many businesses are hiring more HTML programmers, graphic design gurus, and a myriad of content personnel to help out.

Coordinating the efforts of such specialists requires the use of professional Web authoring and graphics software products that work smoothly together. Macromedia's recently released Dreamweaver 3/Fireworks 3 Studio is designed to do just that. The package combines Dreamweaver's Web authoring features and Fireworks' Web graphics capabilities, and adds new features that streamline coding chores, safeguard against teamwork slip-ups, and allow easy interface modifications.

The package is also a good value. The combo Studio sells for about $330 (street); Dreamweaver 3 sells separately for about $240, and Fireworks 3 sells for about $140.

For simple home page design, this combo package would amount to a bit of overkill. But for more ambitious online projects, it provides a ton of great technologies that can help your Web site grow.

Clean Up Your Code

Dreamweaver's newest tools can help keep code clean, designs consistent, and confusion minimal. Most professional Web programs let you look at the code behind the layout, but they won't let you modify the HTML while the layout is still visible. Dreamweaver's new QuickTag editor, however, gives users on-the-spot access to HTML code: Click anywhere on a page layout and press Ctrl-T, and up pops a window with the corresponding code, live and editable. To help you write code, a context-sensitive bubble appears next to your cursor (during pauses), listing HTML tags.

Dreamweaver now also deals with a particularly inconvenient code problem: HTML files created with Microsoft Office apps can be up to five times larger than hand-authored code, and are visible only with Internet Explorer. Dreamweaver's new "Clean Up Word HTML" feature clears out Microsoft-specific styles, so the resulting code is up to 50 percent smaller and viewable by Netscape browsers.

Likewise, Dreamweaver's Tabular Data objects easily convert Excel or Access data into HTML tables; users simply specify a data source and import the text data into a table. No sweat.

Fireworks' Features

For Web graphics, Fireworks' bitmap and vector editing tools are capable, extensive, and logically arranged. The program can also be used to optimize photos, illustrations, and animations for the Web, for sprightly downloads. Like Adobe ImageReady, Fireworks can display up to four live previews of your image in various compression schemes.

Like Adobe ImageStyler, Fireworks lets you apply a whole range of effects to any object you create. The new version also adds image correction filters such as sharpen and hue/saturation. And unlike ImageStyler, Fireworks can use third-party plug-in effects like Kai's Power Tools. There's also a new wizard that automates the process of creating rollover buttons and saves them in the Symbol library.